The Burned-Over District is a term used by some to describe the region of Western New York in the historical period of 1800-1850. It is also sometimes called the Second Great Awakening with a combination of religious, social and political elements.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Our President's Old Rightist Foreign Policy

Typically, criticism of our foreign policy has been directed at the failure to use military force. And the question … I would have is, why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve just gone through a decade of war at enormous costs to our troops and to our budget?

[M]ost of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.

[M]any who were proponents of … a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again.

1 Comments:

The biggest problem with Obama's foreign policy decisions are the image of weakness that he projects abroad. That is a significant problem in a world filled with powers that would very much like to cause all sorts of problems to their neighbors (ahem, Russia). However, Buchanan is absolutely spot on about what the American people want re: foreign policy and Obama is delivering that, albeit with some reluctance (as his adventure in Libya and his attempted adventure in Syria demonstrate). After Iraq and Afghanistan, our military is exhausted and depleted. Even if it was a wise policy for the US to intervene aboard (a very big if in my view), we simply don't have the ability. And if we don't have the ability, the most dangerous thing we can do is pretend that we do.